That's why I'm so pleased that political talk is not allowed here. I just get inundated with politics everywhere, at work, on TV, online, Facebook, etc, and this site is my sanctuary. Where people of all ages can just talk video games. My happy place.

With popular media, a lot of people lately are using the term "politics to refer to content that they disagree with or that makes them uncomfortable, and which they seek to silence with a broad categorical statement. Artists seek to disrupt the status quo, to challenge people to think. It's as true of games as it is any form of media.

Gender identity is not a scientific concept. You're thinking of sex, which is a biological concept. The fact that born males can identify as females and born females can identify as males is self-evident in the fact that they do. It's a thing that happens. Gender is about self-presentation and perception. It is psychological and sociological, not scientific.

Hardcore Sadism wrote: Social Justice is disrupting businesses.

And you're telling me this is a bad thing? In a world where it's 2017 and women still aren't paid equally to men?

I'm not sure where this conversation is going, but I don't believe it''s going to end well. I think this one is well on the way to being a political discussion now. We got talk of "SJWs", gender identity, and the wage gap going on here now, so I'd say we're as deep into Western political discussion as one can be.

Atarifever wrote:I'm not sure where this conversation is going, but I don't believe it''s going to end well. I think this one is well on the way to being a political discussion now. We got talk of "SJWs", gender identity, and the wage gap going on here now, so I'd say we're as deep into Western political discussion as one can be.

I think every work of art or entertainment is in some way political -- or at least ideological -- because it carries with it assumptions about how the world operates or (more importantly) should operate.

If that seems like a stretch, consider all the things in video games to which strongly religious people with certain beliefs might object -- but don't faze non-religious people one bit, or even register on their radar as something potentially objectionable. And we see similar reactions from extremely ideological people from any end of the spectrum: to many of them, anything that conflicts with their beliefs is offensive and insulting.

If you live in a world where people are supposed to act a certain way and believe certain, very specific things, and any other way is wrong, then every form of human expression is potentially loaded and there's no such thing as a neutral statement or a neutral work of art, because everything anyone might say or make is parsed through a single filter: "Are you one of them, or one of us?"

That said, works that are very specific in their political views usually don't age as well as works that try to be subtler and more universal in their politics -- partly because being very specific often means crossing the line into propaganda. (The difference between the best and worst episodes of Star Trek and TNG makes this very clear.)

In any event, hasn't political propaganda been in video games for a long time now anyway? Anyone who's ever fired up an arcade machine and been informed that "Winners Don't Use Drugs" has been on the receiving end, whether or not we agree with that bit of propaganda.